Marco Poloni: Displacement Island (2006)Installation at KØS Museum of Art in Public Spaces

Displacement Island focuses on the many different people – tourists, migrants, refugees, fishermen and border police – whose routes cross daily on and around the Italian island of Lampedusa. Located near Sicily, the island is both a popular holiday destination and a key transit zone for refugees and migrants en route to Europe.Holiday resorts often function as zones of contact and conflict for different kinds of travellers. On Lampedusa, such clashes are extreme, because until recently the island’s CIE (Centre for Identification and Expulsion) was located at the end of the only runway at the local airport. This meant that migrants detained at CIE prior to being deported could look through a barbed-wire fence directly at arriving tourists. For the TRANSIT exhibition, Poloni has created a spatial installation with constellations of photographs spreading across the walls. The photographs do not form any logical, coherent narrative, rather, they form montages creating the potential for new, associative connections through ruptures and shifts.

Poloni uses a wide spectrum of visual material: tourist snapshots, aerial photographs, surveillance images and stills from famous films. The complex imagery bears testimony to the very different conditions for movements applying to the various people on the island. Some are there as tourists, happily posing for private holiday shots. Others, like the military authorities, border police and the staff at CIE, use aerial photography and surveillance images to prevent the free movement of refugees and migrants. Displacement Island also demonstrates how many people have only ever seen transit zones like Lampedusa in the fictional world of film. Last but not least, Poloni’s project shows that not everyone is photographed voluntarily. Due to the precariousness of their position, many refugees and migrants try to keep out of sight of the authorities, tourists and locals alike. They are only visible here via the traces they leave behind: life jackets, the sand-covered remains of clothing on the beach, left-behind cigarette packets and the small, confiscated fishing boats in which they arrived. Marco Paloni was born in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, in 1962. He lives and works in Berlin, Germany and Paris, France.

Marco Poloni: Displacement Island (2006)Installation at KØS Museum of Art in Public Spaces

Displacement Island focuses on the many different people – tourists, migrants, refugees, fishermen and border police – whose routes cross daily on and around the Italian island of Lampedusa. Located near Sicily, the island is both a popular holiday destination and a key transit zone for refugees and migrants en route to Europe.Holiday resorts often function as zones of contact and conflict for different kinds of travellers. On Lampedusa, such clashes are extreme, because until recently the island’s CIE (Centre for Identification and Expulsion) was located at the end of the only runway at the local airport. This meant that migrants detained at CIE prior to being deported could look through a barbed-wire fence directly at arriving tourists. For the TRANSIT exhibition, Poloni has created a spatial installation with constellations of photographs spreading across the walls. The photographs do not form any logical, coherent narrative, rather, they form montages creating the potential for new, associative connections through ruptures and shifts.

Poloni uses a wide spectrum of visual material: tourist snapshots, aerial photographs, surveillance images and stills from famous films. The complex imagery bears testimony to the very different conditions for movements applying to the various people on the island. Some are there as tourists, happily posing for private holiday shots. Others, like the military authorities, border police and the staff at CIE, use aerial photography and surveillance images to prevent the free movement of refugees and migrants. Displacement Island also demonstrates how many people have only ever seen transit zones like Lampedusa in the fictional world of film. Last but not least, Poloni’s project shows that not everyone is photographed voluntarily. Due to the precariousness of their position, many refugees and migrants try to keep out of sight of the authorities, tourists and locals alike. They are only visible here via the traces they leave behind: life jackets, the sand-covered remains of clothing on the beach, left-behind cigarette packets and the small, confiscated fishing boats in which they arrived. Marco Paloni was born in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, in 1962. He lives and works in Berlin, Germany and Paris, France.